47 pages • 1 hour read
Tom FranklinCrooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Angie tells Silas about Larry’s condition and asks if Silas will be coming to the hospital. Silas plans to go to Larry’s to investigate but tells Angie he might meet up with her later depending on how things go at Larry’s. Silas checks in with French, who will go to the hospital before meeting Silas at Larry’s place. At Larry’s house, Silas finds much unchanged since the last time he was there: “Only here once and he still remembered it” (59). Silas finds a vast array of books in Larry’s room; he searches the rest of the house before heading out to the barn. Once there, Silas remembers hunting for lizards and snakes with Larry as a child. Silas worries about encountering a snake but instead finds Larry’s chicken coop.
French joins Silas, and the two search for out-of-place footprints. Silas shows French a .22 pistol found at the crime scene, which French notes Larry was not supposed to have since his gun privileges were taken away. French speculates that Larry may have shot himself and suspects it might have something to do with Tina Rutherford’s disappearance. The two discuss the strangeness of the way Larry lives, with French calling Larry a “frozen in the 1960s kind of character” (64). Silas and French look through the refrigerator and notice a missing can of beer, significant because Larry doesn’t drink due to his father having died in a drunk-driving incident. French and Silas take prints, then plan to talk to Larry once he wakes up. At home, Silas checks his voicemail and realizes he has a message from Larry from earlier in the day: “It’s kind of important, but I don’t want to say it over the phone” (68). Silas muses he got the call just a little too late.
Chapter 5 Summary
A young Larry eats breakfast with his parents on Saturday morning. Carl has a busy day at work ahead of him and can’t take Larry with him. He instructs Larry to cut the grass and stay out of the house, which Larry knows means, “Don’t read all day” (72). As Larry mows the lawn, he reflects on his secret friendship with Silas, the two of them hunting, fishing, and retelling Stephen King stories. Silas has told Larry that his mother doesn’t want them to be friends, which took Larry by surprise.
After Larry finishes cutting the grass, he sneaks off to Silas’s house and watches him practice pitching, noting how good he is. Larry worries about losing his friendship with Silas now that Silas has joined the baseball team and made other friends. Silas catches Larry watching him. Larry takes Silas to Cindy Walker’s house to spy; there, they see Carl with Cindy’s stepfather, Cecil. Cindy comes out in a towel and yells at Cecil, who starts to tug at her towel to try to pull it off as Carl watches on. Silas comes out of hiding and demands they leave Cindy alone. Larry sneaks back to Silas’s house, where Silas accuses him, “You wasn’t gone help her” (82). Larry claims he wanted to.
At home, Larry learns that Carl saw him hiding in the woods at Cindy’s house. Carl demands to know where his gun is. Larry confesses he gave it to Silas. When Ina learns Alice and Silas still live on their property, she demands they leave, or she and Larry will. Carl welcomes her to do so and tells Larry he needs to get the gun back by the next day. Larry goes to Silas and offers to trade for the gun, but Silas doesn’t understand why he can’t keep it when Larry has so many others and Silas only has one. Carl confronts the two boys, having followed Larry, and forces them to fight over the gun. Silas and Larry don’t want to fight, but as Carl eggs them on, Silas pins Larry down. Larry’s childhood stutter comes back as he begins to panic; flustered, Larry calls Silas a “n-n-n-nigger.” Silas hits Larry and pushes Carl away, storming back into the cabin.
Chapter 6 Summary
Silas eats breakfast at the Hub and speaks to its owner, Marla, about Larry and his mistreatment by the town. Marla has a hard time believing Larry could have done what he was accused of: “The politest thing, that boy. Wouldn’t hardly look you in the eye” (94). Silas goes to Larry’s auto shop, Ottomotive, and searches for anything notable. Silas remembers driving past the shop when he first came back to town after his mother died, pretending not to see Larry standing outside.
Returning to Larry’s house, Silas notices broken glass in the driveway, along with some footprints and the roach end of a joint, which he knows Larry wouldn’t have been smoking: “If Larry Ott smoked weed Silas would shoot his badge” (97). Noticing the chickens are hungry, Silas observes the alterations Larry made to their cage to allow them to feed in the fields. Inside the house, Silas looks through the rooms and finds an old box full of photographs in which he sees several pictures of a maid caring for Larry as a baby and is stunned to discover that the maid is his mother.
Silas remembers having to leave Chicago after his mother’s boyfriend, Oliver, was arrested. Oliver always made clear to Silas that he only put up with him for Alice’s sake, but their lives become upended after he leaves. Alice and Silas take the greyhound bus South, stopping first at an address in Memphis, only to find the building boarded up. They continue traveling South. At one stop, a bus driver offers to drive Alice and Silas to some more affordable hotels. Alice seems skittish but finally agrees. Silas sits in the truck bed, listening to Alice and the bus driver talk inside. Silas believes the bus driver wants to have sex with Alice and resents how polite she always is to strangers. Grabbing his backpack, Silas hops out of the back of the truck. Silas hears Alice and the bus driver calling for him, but he runs down side streets until he’s grabbed by some strangers who rough him up and take his things. Alice and the bus driver run them off and take Silas back to the truck, where they discover someone has stolen the hubcaps and Alice’s and Silas’s suitcases.
The bus driver takes them to the station, where an angry Alice tells Silas not to speak to her as they go someplace to have breakfast. Alice tells Silas they’re heading to Chabot and that if he’s going to come with her, he needs to stop misbehaving: “If you want to come, you’re going to be a very different boy. Is that clear?” (110). Silas agrees. They reach the cabin on the Otts’ property, and Alice instructs Silas to find some wood. In present day, Silas wonders why his mother’s picture is in the Otts’ house, and he takes it for himself, knowing he’s technically tampering with a crime scene.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
One of the important themes of the novel is how the past and the present inform and intersect with one another. The novel is told through frequent flashbacks to Larry’s and Silas’s childhoods, overlapping with current-day events. Often what happens in the present day cannot fully be understood without the contextualization of past events. For example, Silas has avoided Larry in modern day since returning to Chabot, though not for the same reasons as everyone else in town. Silas doesn’t seem convinced that Larry is a murderer; his reason for avoiding Larry, who was once his friend, cannot be fully understood until Larry’s point-of-view flashback, in which the reader learns that Larry called Silas a racial slur during a heated argument. Larry regrets this slipup, and he has tried to reinstate his friendship with Silas over the years, but Silas remains distant and avoids him as much as possible.
While the racial slur incident may account for some of Silas’s hostility, hints given by Silas in the modern-day narration suggest that other not-yet-revealed past events will help the reader understand his current-day avoidance of Larry. Similarly, some of Larry’s flashbacks have suggested a strange connection between Carl, Ina, and Alice, but this does not yet account for Silas finding Alice’s picture in the Otts’ house; more events from the past will have to be revealed to explain the mysteries of the present.
One of those mysteries from the present revolves around the two missing girls: Cindy Walker and Tina Rutherford. Cindy plays a key role in two of Larry’s flashbacks, one in which her father, Cecil, throws firecrackers at her for fun, and the other in which Cecil tries to tug off her towel as Carl watches on, only to be interrupted by Silas: “Yall leave that girl alone” (81). The narrative has established that Larry likes to watch Cindy, just as he likes to watch Silas. As Silas notes, “You always spying on people” (82). This does not incriminate Larry, but it leaves ambiguous just what Larry’s relationship with Cindy was, and how much he may have been involved in her disappearance. In Chapter 6, Silas learns while going through Larry’s records that Tina Rutherford’s family was buying Larry’s land from him. Once again, this information does not incriminate Larry, but it does connect him to Tina and provide him with a possible motive, leaving ambiguous whether he is guilty or not.
Racial tensions continue to run high in this section, seen through the incident in Chapter 5 when Carl encourages Larry and Silas to fight: “Yall got to fight it out. Man to man. White to colored” (89). Larry and Silas have tried to forge a friendship despite their differences, but the outside world makes this difficult. So, too, do the internalized prejudices Larry has learned from his father. Larry does not have malicious feelings toward Silas, but he does display some attitudes that indicate he believes that blacks are inferior to whites, such as when he can’t understand why Alice wouldn’t want Silas to be friends with him and when he calls Silas the racial slur during their fight.
Larry also values Silas’s friendship, especially since it is the only one he has. Because of Silas’s poverty and the hardships he’s suffered, Larry can connect to him as he can’t with other boys from his school. Though Larry may have some subconscious racist ideas learned from his father, in many ways, he allows Silas to lead the friendship and determine its parameters. Despite the hotbed of racial tensions around them, the boys form a complex relationship that will continue to impact them into their adulthood.
